Ok so sometimes I actually do stuff other than play games, and then immediately regret it.
I feel anti-social for my movie dislike, alienated at best. When people ask me if I’ve seen this or that movie? No I haven’t. I don’t even know what the movie is you are trying to get me to remember. I probably haven’t seen it, I don’t care. No I won’t come and see the Hangover two with you, I haven’t even seen the first one. Seven pounds was boring, Inception was nonsense and I fell asleep in Lord of the Rings. Yep, my dreams were better than Lord of the Rings. My dislike of spending between two and three hours watching movies has flared up again recently after a spate of movies that can only be described as infuriating. But why? I wouldn’t say I hate movies, it’s more that I just dread watching them. I know most of them are going to be terrible. I never used to be like this, hours of my young life were spent, bottom-on-carpet watching hours upon hours of flickering telly screen. What’s changed? Is it the internet, my secret wish to be a robot or some other reason that I am as yet unaware of. It’s not that I don’t like terrible movies, Some of my favourite movies are terrible, bad acting filled, ten dollar pieces of garbage. Peter Jackson’s Brain Dead is a great example. I think I’ve just moved on. Dear terrible movies I’m breaking up with you, and here’s why.
Lets start with ‘The Mist’ a 2007, horror/scifi thriller. Yes, all three genres in one, a massive undertaking at the best of times, but one that I thought Stephen King of all people might be capable of. I was assured by a friend that this was beacon of cinematic originality, a movie worth writing novels about, the acting, angelic, the concept divine. Admittedly the concept for the movie was pretty cool, the blurb reads, ‘A freak storm unleashes a species of blood-thirsty creatures on a small town, where a small band of citizens hole-up in a supermarket and fight for their lives.’ It sounded alright despite the front cover’s pitiful catchphrase, ‘Fear changes everything’ (almost as bad as The Clash of Titans catchphrase, ‘Titans will clash.’) I settled down, bag of chips in hand and mild dose of healthy scepticism. This lead to plain scepticism and then to anger, which eventually lead to rage and me shouting insults at the screen. How does a movie made in 2007 manage to have CGI that looks as though it was rendered by a blind child randomly mashing buttons on Windows 97? Why were there monsters in the mist that looked like giant octopuses? Was there supposed to be back-story here that was assumed knowledge. Perhaps the movie in question was intended for audiences fifty years from now who had undergone an alien invasion and had stumbled blissfully out of ignorance and into a terrifying world occupied by dinosaurs and giant sea mammals. Maybe within that context I might have understood the movie slightly better. But as it stands it was as bleakly unoriginal as sliced bread. The explanation for how these creatures got to earth, was that a top secret military experiment had somehow ripped a whole in space time, allowing creatures inhabiting a different planet –despite being confusingly similar to earth creatures – to enter a small town in back country America. On top of this all the creatures that came through the void somehow manage to maintain a force shield of impenetrable mist that follows them around wherever they go. Three words to the producers of ‘The Mist,’ suspension of disbelief, you’re doing it wrong. I wasn’t going to mention the ending but it kind of sums up how dreadful this movie really was. Basically the protagonist is forced to kill all of his family, a better death than being ripped apart by the creatures. After he’s killed them he’s screaming out with self-hate, because there wasn’t enough bullets to kill him too and at that moment, the fog clears and rescue workers come to get them. I bet he felt like a right pillock. I knew that would happen, why make it so obvious.
This brings me to my second terrible movie, ‘The Steam Experiment.’ In fact I’m beginning to think I might never watch anything that has ‘The’ in the title ever again. ‘The premise for the steam room is pretty laughable; I can imagine people sitting around the boardroom table, thinking about what movie to make. One of the young upstarts thinks current affairs is a good idea, so he shouts ‘Global Warming’ he’s pointed at solemnly by the director, who then, with a spark in his eyes, says ‘Yes, you, I like you. What else?’ Then someone else shouts out ‘Steam room,’ and nobody wants to be the one who says that it’s a terrible suggestion so they make ‘The Steam Experiment,’ a movie about a deranged scientist who locks 6 people in a steam room and threatens to kill them unless the paper runs his article on global warming. It’s so bad, there isn’t any awful CGI in this one but there is bad acting, bad script and bad twists. The steam experiment has the opposite problem of the mist. In ‘The Mist you know exactly what’s going to happen because it’s being signposted the whole way through whereas in ‘The Steam Experiment’ it’s as though the director was like ‘let just do something completely unexpected, then we’ll get them, they’ll never see it coming, what? Who cares if it doesn’t make sense, let’s just put it in.’ The result of this is that the twist is so utterly confusing that you are left feeling alienated it’s as though the film require full exegesis to extract any meaning whatsoever. I think the moral of the story was, ‘global warming is bad,’ and if you put six people in a steam room together, they will kill each other.’
This got me thinking about why I didn’t like these twists, I’m sure I would have loved it when I was younger. My dislike of movies seems to be directly proportionate with my age, the older I get, the more boring I find movies. Is this phenomenon only affecting me? Is it because we get so much more stimulation from the internet and video games now, that watching a movies seems like a chore. Technology is moving pretty fast these days, it even has a theory called Moore’s Law; it shows that the rate of technology increase is exponential by measuring the increase in the number of transistors we can fit on an intergrated circuit every year. Think about that. It means that every two years we double the intelligence of manmade machines. If only we could double the capacity to make original and interesting movies every two years, imagine what that could do for Hollywood. Gone would be the days of Fast and the Furious Five, Final Destination five hundred (or whatever it is they are up to now.)
In fact I think it’s possible to apply Moore’s law to the making of movies. Let’s make a new theorum right now. The hypothesis shall be that: the number of terrible remakes and/or sequels doubles every two years and is directly proportionate to the decrease in originality. Watch this space. Movie making is dismal at best these days, for every gem there is at least a thousand steamers rolled out on the back of a cash cow, designed specifically to make already poor people pay $17 dollars to see something they’ve already seen with only the slightest (probably worse) changes.
I think part of the reason that movies are less popular than they used to be is because we are used to being entertained multiple ways at once. Here’s a scenario to think about, you pack your bag for a normal day which will consist of getting up, going to work, going out for drinks and then surfing the internet and sleeping. What wouldn’t you leave behind? I don’t know about anyone else, but my phone would be the first thing, then wallet, then ipod, and then Nintendo DS. At any given moment, most of us are carrying around thousands of dollars worth of technology to be used at our every whim. We decide when and how to use our technology. There is an element of choice that draws us in, we can choose who we call, what websites to browse, songs to download and what type of characters we play in games. How can movies even compete? They tell us what to think. No wonder we get bored, where’s the fun in being told what to do? I’d rather the interactivity myself. We can’t just sit down in front of the TV and watch something unencumbered now. Anyone with a laptop will also have that sitting on their lap and be chatting or surfing at the same time. If you had a choice between the internet and the TV, what would you choose?
Ray Kurzweil, a prominent scientist and futurist believes that there will be a point in the future where technology and human intelligence will be indistinguishable. He calls this idea the ‘Singularity’ and I wish it would hurry up so I could transfer my brain into a robot and become an awesome cyborg. I would become an evil mastermind and my mission would be to destroy all the awful movies in the entire world. DVD stores would fear me; my mighty circuits would seek out torrent sites, mass deleting their terrible files. Never again would people have to sit through Biodome with Pauly Shore. The end result of my efforts would be a utopia in which no remakes or sequels existed, unoriginality would not be in tolerated. Any movie with the word ‘labyrinth’ in it would be spared. Young adults and children alike would never have to live in fear of wasting their pocket money on two hours of rage inciting, mind-numbingly boring movies ever again.
So how should we entertain ourselves in the 21st century? Is it merely a question of going back to a simpler time, giving up our modern luxury products? I don’t think so. I think we have passed the point of no return. Now we have to try and find balance between technology and real life. Am I the only one who finds it frustrating that I’m drawn to check facebook several times a day, that I just can’t stop (believe me I’ve tried.) I am trapped, like many of you, in the world I’ve grown up in. My world is the internet, a prison of reward based punishment, it’s where I spend most of my time, and so do you, despite having a secret desire to escape it. I think I’ve reached a state of passive boredom. No matter how many things there are in front of me, if I’m by myself I usually count that as ‘bored.’ Nothing can beat the company of real life for me.
I think there could be a way to release ourselves from the burden of technology without completely removing it. Ubiquitous computing, technology we can’t see working, embedded around us. Real examples of this include belts that tell you where north are, clothes that regulate temperature, photo frames that tell you where the people in the pictures are. Maybe we could invent one that tells us if we will think a movie is rubbish or not.
Speaking of rubbish movies, I just thought of another one, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. You might know it as Heath Ledger’s last film. Sadly it’s also probably his worst. Visually, the movie is amazing; it’s got every last sweet in the candy box. It’s just that the story, was well, terrible. It had glimmers of hope, but it lost itself half way through and became terribly self indulgent and dragged out. Terry Gilligan, what were you thinking? The acting isn’t even bad. It could have been so watchable if only you’d cut out about an hour of the film and replaced it with plot. At the end I was left disgruntled at best.
tbc.
